Left Finds Their Own Kind of Patriotism Under Obama

Left adjusts to a new patriotism under Obama
International Herald Tribune
BERKELEY, California: The hundreds who massed at the University of California campus here on election night responded to Barack Obama’s victory by heading off on a route that has been for a generation the sacred way for the activist left: out the campus gates, through Sproul Plaza, and down Telegraph Avenue toward People’s Park.
By the time they arrived at the intersection of Telegraph and Durant avenues, where a tie-dye vendor occupies one corner, it became clear they did not come to challenge the system now preparing to consecrate a new regime in Washington. At one point, a man scaled a lamppost and unfurled the Stars and Stripes. The crowd broke out in the national anthem.

“People finally felt like our generation had reclaimed patriotism,” said Haley Fagan, 24, a Berkeley paralegal who got stuck in a car trying to cross the street as the crowd surged. “It was a moment that we felt comfortable with it.”

After generations of finding their voice in dissidence, some Americans on the left wing are adjusting not only to a new postelection comfort with patriotic symbols, but also to the political reality they represent. Believing in Obama after Inauguration Day will mean identifying with the machinery of U.S. power.

“There’s a left-wing tradition of being systematically opposed to the U.S. government, knee-jerk reactionary – most of our presidents have made it fairly easy to do,” said Jo Freeman, author of “At Berkeley in the Sixties,” a memoir of her student activism. “Those who view everything the U.S. does as automatically suspect already have a problem doing that with Obama.”

“It will be a patriotic celebration,” Birgeneau said in an interview. “That small circle will now be surrounded by a lot of students who are happy to be members of a nation that just elected its first African-American president.”

Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt turned the federal government into an aggressive agent of liberalism – pushing the New Deal at home and confronting fascism abroad – has the left felt such a deep attachment and invested such hopes in a head of state.

“People in the ’30s felt that for once the government was on their side,” the Berkeley historian Leon Litwack said in an interview. “They had never had that kind of relationship to a president before.”

Disagreements with U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Vietnam, fueled a cynicism about American might and its trappings, Litwack said. He has written in praise of Free Speech Movement leaders for “eschewing the conventional flag-waving, mindless, orchestrated patriotism.”

“They defined loyalty to one’s country as disloyalty to its pretenses, a willingness to unmask its leaders, and a calling to subject its institutions, government and wars to critical examination, not only the decisions made by rulers but often their indecision,” he said.

Such a view of patriotism was so hardened in Berkeley – where, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Fire Department removed flags from its trucks for fear that they could become targets of antiwar demonstrators – that a gathering of College Republicans made the front page of The Los Angeles Times in 2003 for walking down Telegraph waving flags and singing “America the Beautiful” as a sardonic provocation.
A similar, if earnest, display on election night “did strike me as funny and ironic,” said Mark Rudd, who organized campus protests in the 1960s as a national leader of Students for a Democratic Society and who has been critical of President George W. Bush.
“For the last eight years – and probably for much longer – most radicals have been mourning for our country,” he said. “Obviously the empire is not going to fall overnight, but at least there’s been a popular vote that changes the direction of the last 40 years.”
…..the rest of the article is HERE

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Wild Thing’s comment………
They got their UnAmerican leader…now they won’t be burning the flag I guess.
“students who are happy to be members of a nation that just elected its first African-American president”
Communists and socialists happy to have one of their own as President, it has NOTHING to do with that Obama is part black. If they were voting for him because he is a black man then they would also have been for Michael Steele, J.C. Watts, and Justice Thomas.
Being balck has something to do with it but no way is it the only reason.

……Thank you RAC for sending this to me.
RAC has a website that is awesome. 336th Assault Helicopter Company
13th Combat Aviation Battalion – 1st Aviation Brigade – Soc Trang, Republic of Vietnam